Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) companies. There wer

Starting a web-based or SaaS (Software as a Service) business was virtually unheard of before the age of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) companies. There were simply too many hurdles, and the expenses were too high — you’d have to purchase dedicated servers and a high bandwidth connection to handle a load of incoming visitors to your website, hire engineers to build a scalable system, and if you planned to go international, you would have to purchase servers in other geographical locations. The first internet boom was exactly what the author describes. I worked for an internet e-commerce start-up in 1999, and guess what? We had dedicated hosting bandwidth coming into our office, and the hardware and software in place to serve our application. Of course, one of the founders was a sysadmin, but I had friends working for similar start-ups, and they leveraged one of the many co-location providers in the city to manage all the details. Yet their employer still owned actual hardware that they could touch when necessary.